Get the Revere Journal stories emailed to you every week!

The Top Ten

The Revere Journal has once again printed the list of the highest paid top 100 employees in salary and add ons for the year 2011. As lists go, it is, once again, the printing of the same old thing we’ve come to expect of salaries paid to municipal employees.

For those of you who make half what some municipal employees make and work long hours and come home with not enough money to make ends meet, the list is an affront to your best effort.

For those who make more than those municipal employees having made between $209,000 – $93,000, there is the satisfaction of knowing you are a top earner.

The employee list of the top 100 in this city is an unsustainable listing that reveals artificially bloated salaries that will be cut down inevitably in the years to come.

How, we are left to wonder, does a police Lt. make $175,000 in one year? How does he make that? What does he physically tangibly do to justify such a salary?

And it isn’t just a police Lt.

There are sergeants, police officers, firefighters and the vast bulk of the most highly paid employees in this city who have been able, through the use of the system, to up their salaries by enormous, inconsistent, unsustainable amounts of money.

It is frankly mind boggling.

The extra detail payments for police officers are ludicrous. Nearly everyone in government and out of government knows this. The time will one-day come when extra details are relegated to the dustbin of bad history.

In fact, efforts have been made to remake the wheel regarding extra details and their efficacy but no one in government or outside of government has been able to out duel the lobbyists who aid the police in keeping them.

We have no problem with police officers earning overtime but its a stretch to believe that anything is being accomplished by a police officer or any combination of them, receiving their salaries and then receiving $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 or more in extra detail gross.

That is all about foolishness and just about everyone knows it.

Municipal salaries will ultimately be capped because most cities and towns will be unable to pay them not too far into the future.

The future is actually here now, with hiring freezes, pay caps, reductions in pensions, payment of lifetime health insurance and all sorts of things like that.

The reality for Revere’s top 100 employees is that they need to collectively enjoy their jobs while they have them and to prepare for a rainy day for that day is coming.